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I was excited to see this new facebook carpool application. Carpooling is not what you might think. People carpool to and from work together, for road trips, to see the family, and lot’s of different occasions. Carpooling is actually gaining in popularity as a way to conserve energy. I like that when I offer a ride it shows in my mini-feed, this lets my network know about it easily.

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Zimride is an easy, money saving, and dynamic ride-sharing solution. Now carpooling is fun and reliable.

Since launching in 2007, Zimride’s ride-share solutions have served over 300,000 global users. What began as an experiment in sustainability on the east and west coast has quickly evolved into the world’s leading social online ride-sharing company. We currently work with companies, universities, bands, and municipalities around the globe. Our goal is to use social technology to maximize the efficiency of our transportation system and to reshape the way we think about transportation.

Our ride-sharing community is based on simple and intuitive software, which combines Google Maps, familiar social networking components, and our proprietary ride-matching algorithm. We hope that you will come on board with us as we expand the carpooling community and build a more sustainable transportation system. Get started now, and post your ride!

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An eco-city reduces its ecological footprint to fit within the boundaries of one planet. In an eco-city, people and organisations adapt to a changing climate and gladly act to build a sustainable future.

As an eco-city, Melbourne has a healthy environment with a high quality of life and a growing economy. We will develop and use technology to preserve resources to ensure the city is sustainable now and in the future. Melbourne will achieve zero net emissions, manage climate change risks and lead the way in sustainable water management.

An eco-city is compact, with a high density of housing, business and cultural uses that sustain an effective public transport system, and walking and cycling above car use. With excellent air quality and generous public open space and landscaping, biodiversity is supported and people enjoy the benefits of health and happiness. City infrastructure and buildings generate and use renewable energy and feed into the metropolitan electricity grid. Food is grown locally and creatively, using horizontal and vertical spaces on buildings and in private and public gardens.

article in the Sydney Morning Herald which has reported that the Sydney Postharvest Laboratory tested supermarket apples and found them to be up to 10 months old!

The test used Australia’s major supermarkets Woolworth’s and Coles; Analysis showed the Woolworths samples were about 10 months old while the Coles product had spent 9 months in storage since being harvested. The apples are pumped with a ripening hormone and coated in wax to give a nice appearance. What is the point of buying an apple like this, surely all the nutrition has left it?

The supermarkets say that they do it because consumers want apples all year round. But would customers buy this produce if they knew how old it was and what had been done to preserve it? I reckon they would definitely go for an alternative, something that is in season now.

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The terms “farmers’ market” and “growers’ market” have only received widespread use in Australia in the last decade as a result of globalisation, so it is worth remembering that many long-established produce markets often consist of farmers and growers selling their own produce. The listing below are those that label themselves farmers’ markets – many other produce markets can be found in our listing of Markets in Victoria. Farmers’ markets are opening and closing all the time, and we will mention newly opened farmers’ markets in our free email newsletter about great things to do in Melbourne.

South African telecommunications innovator Rael Lissoos has been named Social Entrepreneur of the Year for his project Dabba which brings cheap mobile communication technology to townships in South Africa.

“We’re looking for new financing possibilities, such as mobile banking, program investment, social financing and peer-to-peer lending,” said Ashoka’s Changemakers Executive Director, Charlie Brown. “These methods are already starting to help people better access, spend and save their money, so we want to offer them to millions more worldwide.”

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Much the same as what Umberto Eco said about why Architects in Italy went into university – in the decade post WWII. No jobs, and back to uni to study and teach. So emerged semiotics and a fascination with texts.

Instead of rushing out onto the job market to make a quick buck, more and more young people are deciding to stay in school to educate themselves further while riding out the economic downturn. We will no doubt see an increase in the number of research projects bringing us new ideas for business development.

The embarassing little secret is that it never was. It would be nice to have a story of the innovative, disruptive master Linux plan breaking down the ossified IT industry, but that would be rewriting history. Linux itself started as an educational coding project, but Linux as a product was just the Unix scene’s not-quite-unthinking reaction against the actual disruptive product, Microsoft Windows NT.
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft’s product was a cheap, hot alternative to overpriced, incompatible “open systems” from greedy, shortsighted Unix vendors. It didn’t work especially well, but it offered something to customers who were denied Unix, by price or learning curve. That’s the whole point of a disruptive product; it doesn’t have to be good.

The Rhode Island School of Design has asked our Sami Nerenberg to develop and teach a new course in RISD’s industrial design department! Her answer? An innovative new senior studio: Design for Social Entrepreneurship. Reading the course description (below) it sounds like it will be an amazing and inspirational experience for the lucky RISD students who get to take her class. Makes me want to go back to school! We’ll keep you posted as the course developes.

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The job market firs totally dissappeared in the 90s then came back slowly – but still the work scene for designers in Melbourne is not good. Nowhere near what you see in China and India – where you see jobs advertised in big companies – stable jobs with annual salaries. What we have is mainly piece rate, hour rate, and project opportunities. No super and no benefits. I feel designers are better of turning into entrepreneurs – and so lets mae a the world a better place. Sort of.

As the unemployment rate continues to rise and is forecasted to increase by the end of the year, many workers are finding it harder and harder to have a sustainable job. A slowing economy has forced many large corporations to cut down on and restrict resources, and unfortunately it looks like the situation will only get worse before it gets better 1. A recent Goldman Sachs survey shows that “CIOs will most likely look to cut their resources first from lower-value augmented [contract] IT staff” in 2009 2. The increasingly harrowing state of our economy is forcing people to seek out new ways of making money, whether it is online or in the real world.

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Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

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There are so many benefits to being a locavore (one who looks first to buying locally produced food) — it helps the regional economy and the environment, the farmers who we want to help stay in business, and us, because I think the the food just tastes better.

Chris Brogan, who continues to dazzle us with his thoughtful and helpful social media blog posts (I recommend subscribing to him) lists out “50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing“.

In twitter, Jon Burg suggests the lists could be segmented to further help understanding, I recommenced doing this by the 5 social computing objectives we’ve found at Forrester.

I’ve taken Chris’s exact list, but have segmented it into the five objectives. This way, you’re not randomly choosing tactics without first having a goal in mind. Of course, the first thing to do is to first understand how your community uses social technologies, start by using this free social technographics profile generator.

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“Local” is relative in a place like Dallas. I spent a couple of hours Saturday morning — a lot of it in the car — scooping up local fare.
First stop was the organic farmers market hosted twice a month at Eden’s Organic Garden Center in Balch Springs. No whining — this funky spot is nestled in the crook of where 635 meets I-20, so it’s fairly easy to get to. The market itself is tiny but what’s there is worth finding.

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And we won’t get that without a massive transformation in how this country works. We need tax reform (towards green taxes), new regulations, intellectual property reform, campaign finance reform, a restoration of our lost rights and judicial reform (to restore the integrity of our legal system), a huge move towards governmental transparency and the democratization of information, and active support for citizen media and public foresight. We need a new culture of corporate accountability, financial reforms to stabilize the system and restore confidence, an explosion of entrepreneurial energies and spurs to innovation (like new R+D investment incentives, competitive prizes, university research funding and the like). We need social innovation throughout our society, finding new ways to help people who are currently trapped in this nation’s scandalous combination of poverty, debt, joblessness, lack of education and lack of health care to become people who are helping to create and build the solutions. That will take green collar jobs, sure, but also civic empowerment, labor rights and legal protections for those at the bottom; not only health care reform but a restored priority on public health; social marketing and community education to spread new innovations, and an overall focus on social well-being and human development, rather than merely GDP, as the measures of our success. In all these fields, radically successful models can be found around the world.

One reason we’re locked into an auto-oriented way of thinking about life is that our consumer economy is primarily designed for households with a car. For example, instead of corner grocery stores like they have in Europe, where people walk down the block to buy what they need for the day, Americans buy a week’s worth of groceries all together. Thus, corner stores mostly just sell liquor and supermarkets grow ever huger to compete. And of course, it’s extremely difficult to transport that many groceries without a car.

This doesn’t doom us to a society of mandatory car ownership; car sharing makes it eminently reasonable for carless households to shop this way. But it’s also not the only way. In New York City, small portable shopping carts are a common sight, and teenagers to grandmothers easily transport a few bags of groceries home from the store without ever driving.

Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools “inside the moat” and outside of it “in the cloud.”

It is for these reasons that I don’t count Sakai, Moodle, D2L or Angel amongst the biggest, long-term threats to Blackboard. Disruption will, I believe, come from another direction.